With Ubuntu 9.04 (aka Jaunty Jackalope) nearing completion, I'm getting more and more concerned about the fact that it will probably not feature out-of-the-box OpenGL support for my notebook (or, more precisely, its ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics board). For those of you not in the know, AMD will drop support for quite a few of their not-so-recent products in the Catalyst 9.4 version of their proprietary fglrx graphics driver, so future releases will not work with R500 series chipsets and below. The news of moving the responsibility for supporting legacy cards to the open source drivers was not well received (there was quite an outrage at the Phoronix discussion board [1]), but the decision stands. Unlike the Windows version of Catalyst, there won’t even be bugfix releases for legacy cards.
For me personally, this issue wouldn’t be so acute were it not for Ubuntu’s decision to ship a rather recent X version (X Server 1.6) which is in turn not supported by any driver prior to Catalyst 9.4. And since the free-as-in-freedom xf86-video-ati driver’s OpenGL support is still rather limited on my Mobility Radeon’s R350, I’m feeling a bit out of options for a proper migration path. This is a bit ironic considering how I was previously hit by a bug in the fglrx driver shipped with Ubuntu Intrepid that essentially forced me to run a rather complicated mixed-release setup with a number of outdated Ubuntu Hardy packages. Well, at least I’m getting used to this kind of crap ;)
If this wasn’t a notebook, I’d just plug in a newer graphics card (not sure if it would be one by AMD, though) and be done with it.
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It's not that bad...
Came across this post through google. I know it's old, but I wanted to offer my insight anyways.
I think it was a bit early for them to do this, since the opensource drivers aren't fully ready yet, but in the end AMD will still be providing help to the developers I guess, so it's not as much an end to "support" as it is an end to the proprietary driver. They probably figure that this will accelerate the adoption of the open driver, and increase the level of testing and so on which will also aid in development. I think we're all in agreement that since the docs for R300 all the way up to R700 have been released, that the community is well on their way to eventually surpassing the proprietary stuff. Although it does suck that "for now" they've kind of left everyone dead in the water.
Although, this doesn't dissuade me from AMD/ATI, the fact that they've opened the docs to me shows their commitment to Linux well enough, and I've already decided never to buy another nVidia card ever again unless they open their documentation too, and even then maybe not (just out of spite).
Now if only someone out there could reverse-engineer the UVD/UVD2 so we can get accelerated 1080p with the open drivers. :)
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